Joseph Stalin was a ruthless despot who could be utterly charming. He was a pragmatic Marxist- Leninist ideologue, and an intuitive geostrategic thinker who nonetheless made some egregious and inexplicable strategic blunders. He inspired his people as a “father figure” while evincing utter disdain for the lives of individual Russians.
In Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, the first of a three-volume work, Stephen Kotkin tells “the story of Russia’s power in the world and Stalin’s power in Russia.” Kotkin argues that Stalin was that rare individual whose decisions radically changed history. "More than any other historical figure, even Gandhi or Churchill, a biography of Stalin, as we shall see, comes to approximate a history of the world."
Kotkin places Stalin in a Russian global context, as Russia’s geopolitical position was shaken by the rise of Germany on one side and Japan on the other. This work is not the usual biography; in fact, in the first 300 pages of the book, Stalin only appears periodically as Kotkin describes the structural forces that made Stalin possible.
As Stalin emerges into leadership in the 1920s, Kotkin portrays him as his contemporaries saw him then: not just as a vindictive man seeking power for its own sake but as an “indomitable communist and leader of inner strength, utterly dedicated to Lenin’s ideas, able to carry the entire apparatus, the country, and the cause of the world revolution on his back.” The crux of Kotkin’s interpretation is found in Stalin’s decision to go for all-out collectivization of peasant agriculture, not compelled by necessity but as a wild gamble on Stalin’s part driven by his ideological conviction that socialism in Russia demanded an end to small-scale peasant farming.
In this SDG, will use Kotkin's first volume to cover the momentous events from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the end of the first quarter of the twentieth. This is an amazing story and encompasses, as Kotkin suggests, "the history of the world.”
While the core book may appear daunting, it contains nearly 250 pages of notes and an extensive bibliography. Our average weekly reading will be roughly 60 pages a week. Kotkin tells a gripping story in a book that is hard to put down once you start reading it.
